To the barmen at the Ritz’s beautiful Rivoli Bar — where we meet, every month, to catch up on the minutiae of each other’s lives and make our way through two bottles of champagne (never three: we know our limits) — we probably look like any other gaggle of 60-somethings.

However, we are the only guests to eat all the free snacks that come with our fizz, and then cheerfully ask for more.

But to my eyes, we’re not all that different from the girls we once were when we met, 45 years ago, queuing for breakfast in the canteen of St Anne’s College, Oxford.

Here come the girls: (L to R) Claire, Alex, Maeve, Presiley and Harriet are as sassy at sixty as they were when they met 45 years ago

Presiley still has the characteristic giggle; Harriet the eye for a sharp shift dress; Claire the same aura of mystery; and Alex, well, she looks even better now than she did then. No kidding.

Back then, we were five hopeful 18-year-olds, intoxicated at leaving home, eager to make friends and relieved to find each other’s friendly faces amongst all the students we thought were much cleverer than we were.

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We could have had no idea how strong those bonds would still be, now. Or, for that matter, that three of us would end up in Who’s Who.

Presiley Baxendale became a QC and skewered Mrs Thatcher in the Arms-for-Iraq enquiry; Harriet Spicer was a director of Virago, the feminist publishing house; Alex Brett Holt, a senior government lawyer; and Claire L’Enfant, an editorial director for publishers Routledge.

Generation gap: Maeve with her mother, then aged 60

I was the flibbertigibbet changing from publishing to journalism to TV, before finally becoming a novelist at 40.

Although I was stunned by the runaway success of my debut, Having It All, when it was published in 1991, perhaps I shouldn’t have been — in charting the perils faced by young working mothers, I was tapping into the emotional dilemma felt by all five of us; the first generation of women conflicted by wanting successful careers but missing our children.

And just as I mined our 30-something experiences for that first novel, so our enduring friendship (fuelled by a mutual love of fun, fashion and champagne) has inspired me to identify a whole new category: the SOTs — Still Out There at Sixty — for my latest.

Freer than ever from the constraints of childcare, career demands and self-doubt, we 60-somethings have long given up worrying about having it all, and are now simply busy having the time of our lives.

There’s a photo of my mother at 60 (younger then than I am now, at 64) that still sits on my dresser: with hair like the Queen and a below-the-knee tweedy skirt. But not for me, or my old (yet young at heart) friends, a sedate slide into cardigan and slippers, warmed by the fire.

We don’t just look different, we have led our lives by different rules. Our mothers, for example, couldn’t have dreamed of choosing independence over settling down and getting married.

But by 1969, when the five of us went up to Oxford, it was the year of Woodstock, of sex ’n’ drugs and rock ’n’ roll, of Biba boots and Vidal Sassoon haircuts — and the times were definitely a’ changin’.

No matter that we came from different backgrounds: Presiley and Harriet were the posh ones, while Claire and Alex had grown up in London and I was a convent girl from Worthing. The melting pot of college life threw us together, in our joint pursuit of fun.

When I'm 64: Maeve, 64, is ready for a little me time

If anything, we felt a bit dull compared to the stars-in-the-making among our contemporaries: Tina Brown, in the year below at St Anne’s, went on to edit Vanity Fair and the New Yorker; while broadcaster Libby Purves (now OBE, no less) was in the year above. Bill Clinton, we have heard, was at one of the same parties, although we managed not to meet him.

We did, however, see each other through so many fraught moments, from fear of failing exams to broken hearts. Since then we have been through so much more together: love, loss, professional successes and setbacks, and, from time to time, illness.

Our toughest challenge of all — with 11 children between the five of us — was combining careers with the small things which make up family life: from meal times to bedtime stories.

I didn’t meet my husband, another Alex, till I was well into my 30s. I was 35 when I had my first child, Georgia, now 27.

Holly, now 25 came next two years later, and it was her birth that spurred me to realise that life spent juggling two small children and a demanding TV career simply wasn’t making me happy. By the time James, now 20, arrived, I had chosen to step off the ladder and take up writing, instead.

But if I had no idea, when penning Having It All, that it would ring bells with so many other women in my position, I could have had even less that it would cause the huge controversy that it did.

All of a sudden, as millions of copies sold, I found myself thrust into the spotlight and even onto the television news, defending myself from the label ‘anti-feminist’.

Outraged, it was Alex, Claire, Presiley and Harriet — all struggling to achieve a work-life balance of their own — who instantly jumped to my defence. Presiley, an eminent lawyer at the time, even offered to go on the news and defend me, too.

I was so touched. Much like the time, aged 18, when I had a broken heart (who broke it? That has disappeared into the mists of time) and she scooped me up and took me to her granny’s house in Devon.

Presiley, the kindest of friends, still does the same now. When Alex was suffering from the side effects of chemotherapy after breast cancer a few years ago she swept her off — this time to Buckinghamshire — wrapped her in rugs and fed her macaroons.

Freer than ever: Harriet Spicer (left) and Claire L'Enfant (right) have left their worries behind them

Not only Alex, but also Claire and Harriet have all experienced breast cancer — like one in eight women in the UK. Thankfully, my treasured friends survived, and the one welcome effect has been to make us all live in the moment, to appreciate even more strongly our friendship.

Our story is the story of so many of our generation, who, like us, have been touched by hardships which make them even more hellbent to enjoy life to the full.

We all wanted to clap when Alex, a year after her brush with cancer, walked into the Rivoli with her newly-short hair dyed blonde, wearing leopard-print and an amazing pair of chandelier earrings. Seeing her, so stylish and vibrant, reminded me just how times have changed for my generation, who still shop in H&M and Zara, and definitely don’t feel our age.

Now, instead of me yelling at Georgia and Holly that ‘You can’t go out in that!’ I’m the one asking them, ‘Can I go out in this?’

As I’m now fond of saying, ‘The only way you can tell how old a woman is now is to look at her husband!’

Rewriting the rules: Like all 60 somethings, Presily Baxendale (left) and Alex Brett Holt (right) are navigating an uncharted phase of life

Of course women have more opportunities to cheat time — even without resorting to the dreaded Botox. All of us have been through the ‘to dye or not to dye?’ dilemma.

I will take the L’Oreal option to my grave. As the wonderful Nora Ephron — high priestess of elegant ageing, who wrote When Harry Met Sally — pointed out, hair dye can probably claim more responsibility for women’s advancement than feminism.

But it isn’t just hair, or clothes, that have helped redefine 60. It’s behaviour. The idea that women had once to get their husband’s signature to apply for a passport would make my daughters roar with laughter. Never mind that ‘nice’ women of my mother’s era would certainly never have gathered in a bar.

We sassy 60-somethings are navigating a hitherto uncharted phase of life. We have (in the main) paid off the mortgage and are the main beneficiaries of the property boom, not to mention the last of the reasonable pension plans, so we intend to enjoy ourselves. Suddenly, without the commitment of childcare or the constraints of term-time, we’re travelling more widely, too: Harriet has just spent a month exploring India, and after an adventure in Burma last year I’m planning Morocco’s Atlas mountains for October.

Putting on the Ritz: Maeve (centre) and her friends enjoying their monthly meeting at The Ritz in 2008

A few years ago I had the excitement of attending the Emmys in LA with my husband, a TV executive, who was up for an award. Needless to say my friends all advised me on what to wear.

You haven’t lived until you’ve walked down the red carpet in a long evening dress at the age of 60, full of the confidence of not really caring what others thought of you and realising that if you’d been 30 you would have been in agonies of insecurity.

Today’s 30-somethings, now the ones in the throes of juggling career and children, actually get quite cross with the sassy 60s, for having too good a time and not being available at the drop of a hat for grandparenting.

‘Sorry, darling, I’m having a spa day,’ is proving curiously unpopular with the younger generation looking for free babysitting, I hear.

But we’ve worked hard to get here. Having trailblazed working motherhood, now we’re ready for a little Me Time: whether that’s chucking it all in to see the world, or slowing down to smell the violets and hear the birds sing.

No doubt I’ll go gaga, just like everyone else, when I do get grandchildren. But 64 just ain’t the way it used to be.

Swinging sixties: Maeve, Presiley and Harriet during their uni days

On my
birthday in April my husband played me the Paul McCartney song — all
knitting by the fireside, with grandchildren on the knee — then made up
for it with two hours of everything from Marrakech Express to Born To Be
Wild and Hotel California.

It
reminded me how, at 19, I went to a rock festival with a boy I’d met
two days earlier, probably went to bed with him (ssh, don’t tell my
children, but the times were like that then) and watched Sixties band
Steppenwolf play Born To Be Wild with the immortal words, ‘We’re looking
for adventure, and whatever comes our way.’

We
still are. Not of the sharing-a-sleeping-bag variety, but because
although we really aren’t old yet, we’re old enough to know life is
finite.

Nora
Ephron (who sadly died two years ago at 72) also said that after 60
‘death is a sniper’. And that sense sees us seizing the day, determined
to enjoy life to the full.

Enduring friends: At 60 life these women's lives are as full of optimism and possibility as ever

At least we five know that when the knocks inevitably come we will have each other to soothe the wounds. Presiley will probably sweep us off somewhere and feed us up.

When I first thought of writing a novel about a group of 60-somethings I wondered if my publishers might say sorry, no one cares; but they understood at once that life is as full of optimism and possibility as ever.

Not least because of the wonderful, nurturing nature of enduring female friends like mine — in whose eyes we will be forever 18.

The Time Of Their Lives is published by Pan Books at £7.99.

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Still Sassy at Sixty: At the same age their mums were in tweed and slippers. But a new breed of older woman is rewriting the rules